Ma Bu — Winter Horse Ceremony in Ancient Chinese Ritual 马步

Ma Bu (马步, Mǎ Bù, lit. “Horse Step”) is an ancient Chinese sacrificial ceremony performed in winter to honor the horse-harming spirit. The term appears in the “Xia Guan: Xiaoren” (夏官·校人) chapter of the Zhouli (周礼, “Rites of Zhou”), a Warring States period administrative text detailing the bureaucratic structure and ritual protocols of the idealized Zhou dynasty. Ma Bu was the final component of a four-season horse sacrifice system maintained by the Zhou royal household to ensure the health and propagation of the state’s horses — vital military and economic assets whose welfare required year-round ritual attention.

The primary source is the Zhouli (周礼), compiled during the Warring States period (c. 4th–3rd centuries BCE) and edited by Liu Xin (刘歆, c. 50 BCE–23 CE) during the Western Han Dynasty. The “Xia Guan: Xiaoren” chapter prescribes:

Zheng Xuan (郑玄, 127–200 CE) provides the definitive gloss: “马步神，为灾害马者。” (“Ma Bu is the spirit that harms horses.”) Tang Dynasty scholar Jia Gongyan (贾公彦, 7th century CE) elaborates in his sub-commentary:

The Liji Zhengyi (礼记正义), the Tang Dynasty orthodox commentary on the Book of Rites, discusses the broader framework of animal husbandry rituals within the Zhou ritual order, providing additional context for the Ma Bu’s place within the annual sacrificial calendar.

Ma Bu is the fourth and final ceremony in the four-season horse sacrifice system (四时马祭) prescribed in the Zhouli “Xia Guan: Xiaoren” chapter. Each ceremony addressed a distinct aspect of equine welfare:

In the Zhengyi tradition, the Ma Bu ritual exemplifies the school’s deep engagement with the classical Chinese ritual heritage. While Zhengyi Daoism does not maintain a direct liturgical equivalent of the Zhou-dynasty horse sacrifices, the underlying ritual logic of disease-warding and apotropaic offering closely parallels Zhengyi practices such as rāngzāi (禳灾, “disaster-averting”) ceremonies. The naming convention of “Bu” as a category of harmful spirit finds echoes in later Daoist classifications of malevolent influences and the ritual mechanisms for neutralizing them. Within Longhu Mountain’s liturgical corpus, the principles of seasonal alignment and the appeasement of potentially harmful spirits remain active components of Zhengyi ritual theory. For the broader history of how Daoist apotropaic and offering ceremonies developed from these ancient foundations, see The History of Taoist Ritual of Fasting and Offering Sacrifices.

The Ma Bu’s dual function — simultaneously warding off harm and presenting the year’s horses to the king — reflects the classical Chinese principle that ritual must address both the negative (expelling harmful forces) and the positive (presenting achievements to higher authority). This dual logic continues in Zhengyi practice, where major ceremonies combine exorcistic elements with offerings of gratitude and report to the celestial bureaucracy. For a practical overview of how such ritual protocols are structured and performed today, see What Is a Taoist Ritual and Their Process.

The Ma Bu ceremony encapsulates a foundational principle of classical Chinese apotropaic ritual: that harmful spiritual forces must be formally acknowledged and ritually appeased rather than simply ignored. By dedicating a specific seasonal ceremony to the horse-harming spirit — the very deity responsible for equine disease — the Zhou ritual system institutionalized a comprehensive approach to animal welfare that combined practical veterinary concern with cosmic ritual management. The winter timing was significant: as the season of completion and storage, winter was the appropriate moment to account for the year’s horses, present the mature animals to the king, and ward off the diseases that cold weather brought. In this convergence of apotropaic ritual, practical herd management, and ceremonial accounting, the Ma Bu exemplifies the classical Chinese understanding that the boundary between the practical and the sacred is not a boundary at all.